‘Abolish Ice’ or ‘Lock ’em Up?’ A Nonprofit’s Middle Ground Approach to Justice
With federal funding cuts and crime declining, the Vera Institute’s new president argues philanthropy has a rare opening to advance criminal justice reform across ideological lines.
By Alex Daniels
Senior Editor, Foundations
March 31, 2026 | Read Time: 9 minutes
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When she steps into her new role as CEO of the Vera Institute of Justice this month, Insha Rahman will be leading an ongoing legal case against President Trump’s Department of Justice. Last April, the agency abruptly canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to more than 200 nonprofits, including $5 million Vera relied on to pursue alternative approaches to law enforcement.
As she and a coalition of nonprofits press their legal attack against an administration she says is pursuing an “authoritarian agenda,” Rahman is also looking for ways to get buy-in from people from across the political spectrum on effective law enforcement policies.
Rahman hopes that Vera, which posted $44.5 million in revenue in 2025, including grants from big foundations like Ford and MacArthur, can encourage more grant makers to support nonprofits working on new criminal justice approaches. Philanthropic support is often used to test ideas government agencies consider too risky, and in the years leading up to the pandemic, foundations responded.
Too often the political debate over policing, trial procedures, and incarceration gets reduced to mere sloganeering, said Rahman. She is the first woman, immigrant, and Muslim to lead the venerable criminal justice research and advocacy nonprofit. Conservatives, she said, will say, “Lock them up and throw away the key,” while liberals will chant, “Defund the police” or “Abolish ICE.”
What’s missing, she said, is a set of tested approaches to law enforcement that are based on human dignity and protect the public.
That approach — which Rahman, a former public defender in the Bronx, calls being “serious about safety” — was the motivation behind the Vera grants slashed last year by the federal government. Her early-career introduction to the courts soured her on what she saw as an “assembly line” approach to justice.
Vera had been helping cities expand civilian crisis-response teams to reduce the number of mental-health calls that might otherwise fall to police, training corrections officials to improve prison culture, and supporting law enforcement to better respond to deaf survivors of domestic violence.
In March, Vera received a form letter from the Department of Justice saying its federally supported programs were not in sync with the administration’s priorities and that funding was terminated immediately.
The federal support ended as philanthropic support softened. After peaking at $678 million in 2023, criminal justice grant making appears to have declined significantly over the past two years, according to data from Candid that was analyzed by Bridgespan, a philanthropy consulting group. Marina Fisher, a partner at Bridgespan, cautioned that a full tally for the past two years of grant making was unavailable due to a time lag between when grants are made and reported to the Internal Revenue Service, but it appears to be significantly lower than its 2023 mark.
Some of Vera’s federally supported work was already showing measurable results, Rahman said. She points to Vera’s Restoring Promise program, in which prison units are redesigned to look more inviting, and younger incarcerated people are paired with mentors and given more freedom to decorate and personalize the entranceways to their cells. Those living in Restoring Promise units, which exist in facilities in five states, were 73 percent less likely to be involved in violent altercations and more than 80 percent less likely to be sent to solitary confinement, according to research led by Vera.
Violent crime spiked during the pandemic and has since declined across most major cities and categories of crime, according to the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank.
Rahman believes that President Trump, who has deployed federal agents to Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Washington, D.C., and other cities, will say his law-and-order approach made cities safer. But she argues the declines reflect policy changes like those Vera has promoted.
The decline, she said, strengthens the case for increased foundation support. In the years since the pandemic, she’s experienced a retrenchment among criminal justice funders. But Rahman said foundations are becoming more interested as the broader public looks for new approaches to public safety.
“The large swath of the country that considers themselves moderate and independent actually really favor this serious-about-safety approach,” she said. “That’s actually where the center of gravity is, even if the political debate sort of glosses over that. Safety is not a partisan thing.”
Bipartisan Opportunity
Following the January killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis, more Americans might be inclined to find a middle ground on law enforcement, Rahman said. After months of armed federal patrols in American cities, she argued, people from a variety of political viewpoints began to view Trump’s approach as a disruption of public safety, and have become less hesitant to call out what they view as the White House’s overreach. More than two-thirds of Americans think the federal government should prioritize addressing social problems over law enforcement, according to a January Gallup poll.
Such attitudes could augur well for meaningful changes in policing and incarceration. Experts from various political backgrounds point out that despite heated rhetoric on crime, policymakers have reached bipartisan agreements on policy even during President Trump’s highly polarized first term.
Both David Safavian, chief operating officer at Unify.Us, a conservative think tank, and Vanita Gupta, who served as associate U.S. attorney general under presidents Biden and Obama, point to the 2018 First Step Act as an example of how politicians of both parties can find common solutions on the response to crime. The law reduced mandatory minimum sentences for certain crimes, gave incarcerated people the possibility of reducing their sentences by participating in anti-recidivism classes, and stipulated that people could serve time in facilities relatively close to their homes.
Passage of the act came after years of increased criminal justice funding from philanthropy. Foundations supported nonprofits working to end mass incarceration, end stop-and-frisk policies, and lower the burden placed on police. Support from strange bedfellows, like the American Conservative Union and the American Civil Liberties Union, helped build momentum for the legislation.
President Trump’s backing of the First Step Act signaled to Republican policymakers that it was “OK” to improve the system, Safavian said. Conservatives do want to change criminal justice policy, he said, but need to be assured that new laws will not jeopardize public safety, that people will be held accountable for illegal activity, and that new policies will reduce recidivism.
As long as those principles are addressed, there is plenty of common ground to be found on criminal justice policy, said Safavian, who serves as a senior adviser to the Conservative Political Action Coalition. But Safavian, who served time in prison, and was later pardoned, related to his dealings with former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, said a political environment that rewards conflict can get in the way.
“Voters are smart,” he wrote in an email. “They support second chances. And they intuitively understand that ‘lock ’em up and throw away the key’ may sound okay, but the approach is neither sustainable nor advisable. Unfortunately, the political consultant class missed the memo.”
The post-pandemic drop in violent crime offers an opportunity to enact policy changes like the ones championed by Vera, but on a larger scale, said Gupta, who is director of the New York University Law School’s Center for Law and Public Trust. At times of high crime, policy-making can be dominated by fear, rather than evidence. Any new policies, she said, cannot lose sight of the need to prevent violent crime, “but politicizing the issue will yield very irrational and potentially very harmful solutions.”
Vera still prioritizes the criminal justice research it has supported for six decades. To push for policy changes, its lobbying affiliate, Vera Action, supports legislation on Capitol Hill and in state capitals. But a big part of what’s needed, Rahman said, is for groups like Vera to communicate the benefits of new approaches to policymakers and the broader public.
“People shouldn’t just feel an injustice and treat it as an abstraction,” she said. “As we’re watching crime decline, as we’re watching neighborhoods become safer and more vibrant places to live, we’ve got to tell those stories of solutions as well.”
‘We Just Did It’
If there was a place where those stories might be a hard sell, it might be Idaho.
Last year, the state’s Republican-led legislature passed a slate of tough new laws on crime and punishment. They passed mandatory minimum sentences for marijuana possession. They required people on parole to submit to warrantless searches by police. And they made the firing squad the state’s preferred method of execution.
In that context, Idaho Director of Corrections Bree Derrick, didn’t seek state funding to participate in Vera’s Restoring Promise program.
“We weren’t shouting from the treetops,” she said. “We didn’t make it a political issue. We didn’t ask for legislative approval, we just did it.”
Derrick’s department is testing the approach in Unit 14 of a medium-security men’s prison south of Boise. The walls of the unit are painted sage green. Inmates are allowed to decorate their rooms and entranceways with pictures and plants. Younger people, who Derrick said are more susceptible to falling in with gangs, are paired with older mentors. Groups meet daily to discuss their challenges and accomplishments.
Vera did not directly fund the changes. Instead, it collected research on the prison’s under-25 population, surveyed program participants, and trained mentors.
While state policymakers still tend to favor more punitive approaches, Derrick senses that the conversation may be changing. In part, that’s because running prisons with growing populations is expensive. But a more human element may also be at play, she said.
Ordinarily, when you walk into a prison unit, the atmosphere is charged with a toxic buzz, Derrick said. People flex. But in Unit 14, people approach visitors and want to meet, to talk. The changes have been so encouraging that Derrick is planning on expanding the program to other units and possibly to women’s facilities.
When Derrick takes people on tours, particularly legislators, she said they will often start by saying, “I hope you’re hard on people. I hope you’re just really punitive.”
By the end of the tour, which winds up in Unit 14, the attitude has shifted — closer to the commitment to human dignity Vera espouses.
“They’ll say, ‘Oh my gosh, we need more of this. How do we get more of this?’” she said. “For them, it’s not a hot topic political issue. It’s a human issue.”
Correction: This article has been updated to include Vera’s most recent revenue of $44.5 million, which it posted in 2025, and to reflect Insha Rahman’s starting date, which is May 4. She has not started in her new position as president yet.
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